We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies - neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Atul Gawande explores how doctors strive for best performance in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. His stories of diligence and ingenuity take us to battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, to labor and delivery rooms in Boston, to a polio outbreak in India, and to malpractice courtrooms around the country. He discusses the ethical dilemmas of doctors' participation in lethal injections, examines the influence of money on medicine, and recounts the astoundingly contentious history of hand washing.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.

Scrum

By the man who helped invent the red-hot management process known as "Scrum", Scrum unveils what is wrong with the way we currently do work, and how a simple set of principles, applied in exactly the right sequence, can accelerate productivity and quality as much as 1200 percent. Scrum (which gets its name from the formation in rugby in which the whole team locks its arms to gain control of the ball) is the reason that Amazon can launch a new feature on its website every day.

59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot

Richard Wiseman has been troubled by the realization that the self-help industry often promotes exercises that destroy motivation, damage relationships, and reduce creativity: the opposite of everything it promises. Now, in 59 Seconds, he fights back, bringing together the diverse scientific advice that can help you change your life in under a minute, and guides you toward becoming more decisive, more imaginative, more engaged, and altogether more happy.

Who: The A Method for Hiring

Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer a simple, four-step method for hiring with confidence, designed for everyone from the CEO on down. Who shows you how to avoid the most common pitfalls of hiring, how to identify "A Players" - people who can perform their job better than 90 percent of the candidates in their field - and how to make sure the best candidate will be excited to join your organization.

Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care

Dr. Marty Makary is co-developer of the life-saving checklist outlined in Atul Gawande's best-selling The Checklist Manifesto. As a busy surgeon who has worked in many of the best hospitals in the nation, he can testify to the amazing power of modern medicine to cure. But he's also been a witness to a medical culture that routinely leaves surgical sponges inside patients, amputates the wrong limbs, and overdoses children because of sloppy handwriting. Over the last 10 years, neither error rates nor costs have come down, despite scientific progress.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

The guru to the gurus at last shares his knowledge with the rest of us. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's seminal studies in behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, and happiness studies have influenced numerous other authors, including Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman at last offers his own, first book for the general public. It is a lucid and enlightening summary of his life's work. It will change the way you think about thinking. Two systems drive the way we think and make choices, Kahneman explains....

Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster

In Crash Course, Ingrassia answers the big questions: Was Detroit's self-destruction inevitable? What were the key turning points? Why did Japanese automakers manage American workers better than the American companies themselves? Ingrassia also describes dysfunctional corporate cultures (even as GM's market share plunged, the company continued business as usual) and Detroit's perverse system of "inverse layoffs" (which allowed union members to invoke seniority to avoid work).

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth - and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World

We struggle to manage complexity every day. We follow intricate diets to lose weight, juggle multiple remotes to operate our home entertainment systems, face proliferating data at the office, and hack through thickets of regulation at tax time. But complexity isn't destiny. Sull and Eisenhardt argue there's a better way: by developing a few simple yet effective rules, you can tackle even the most complex problems.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition

How to Stop Yourself Before You Make Another Costly Decision - No one intentionally makes bad decisions. Yet we make them all the time. In fact, some of the worst disasters in recent history - the collapse of major investment banks, the global financial meltdown - were the result of seemingly reasonable decisions made by a lot of smart people. How does this happen? Michael J. Mauboussin argues that the correct process for deciding well - especially when the stakes are high - conflicts with how our minds naturally work.

Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

"We spend more time working than doing anything else in life. It's not right that the experience of work should be so demotivating and dehumanizing." So says Laszlo Bock, head of People Operations at the company that transformed how the world interacts with knowledge. This insight is the heart of Work Rules!, a compelling and surprisingly playful manifesto with the potential to change how we work and live.

Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You

A business parable about how to create a start-up that won't trap you when you want to sell it. According to John Warrillow, the number one mistake entrepreneurs make is to build a business that relies too heavily on them. Thus, when the time comes to sell, buyers aren't confident that the company-even if it's profitable-can stand on its own. To illustrate this, Warrillow introduces us to a fictional small business owner named Alex who is struggling to sell his advertising agency.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

From Daniel H. Pink, the author of the groundbreaking best seller A Whole New Mind, comes his next big idea book: a paradigm-changing examination of what truly motivates us and how to harness that knowledge to find greater satisfaction in our lives and our work.

The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economics Die

Best-selling author and world-renowned historian Niall Ferguson has won widespread acclaim for thought-provoking works such as Civilization and High Financier. The Great Degeneration tackles nothing less than the decline of Western civilization. Ferguson posits that slowing growth, outrageous debt, and antisocial behavior are contributing to the erosion of the West’s once rock-solid foundations. Ferguson excavates the causes and shows how heroic leadership and radical reform are needed to right the course.

168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

There are 168 hours in a week. This book is about where the time really goes, and how we can all use it better. It's an unquestioned truth of modern life: we are starved for time. With the rise of two-income families, extreme jobs, and 24/7 connectivity, life is so frenzied we can barely find time to breathe. We tell ourselves we'd like to read more, get to the gym regularly, try new hobbies, and accomplish all kinds of goals.

Publisher's Summary

The New York Times best-selling author of Better and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist.

We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies - neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple 90-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third.

In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from disaster response to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds.

An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential for anyone working to get things right.

I work in IT, and up to now I've managed without checklists. Not any more. As soon as I finished listening to this audiobook, I created six or seven checklists and will begin "field testing" them this week. Gawande's stories are gripping. Many of his examples come from surgery or aviation -- situations where lives are at stake -- and he effectively makes the point that even when disaster looms, a disciplined adherence to the checklist can minimize the effects.

He caps off the book with a harrowing story of a mistake he made as a surgeon: a laparoscopic procedure to remove an adrenal gland went awry, leading to a massive bleed-out. Except that the patient didn't bleed out completely, because the pre-op checklist had caught the fact that the required units of blood weren't on hand, and the situation was rectified before the knife went down.

One of the advantages of the checklist, he says, is its ability to transform a disparate group of people into a coordinated team. This is nowhere more apparent than in his detailed account of the crew's actions during the famous plane-landing-in-the-Hudson incident. The press wanted to play up the heroism of the captain, but the captain himself insisted, over and over again, that it was a group effort, and that the crew's ability to stick to the protocol under duress is the real story.

Next time I go in for surgery myself, the last thing I'm going to ask before the anesthesia kicks in is: "Do you guys have a checklist?"

This is not some esoteric examination of a profoundly simple idea --- it is instead an insightful look at the nature of complexity, information, error and organization. The book is animated by powerful, gripping stories about human endeavor, our failings and our achievements. It is a "must listen".

Lloyd's presentation is also perfect, just the right tone for this book.

As a University professor of mathematics, mine is a simple job. There's little that's complex or complicated about it. So it would seem that Atul Gawande's new book, the Checklist Manifesto, would have little too offer my professional self. And this is OK, because Dr. Gawande expresses his ideas through anecdote and imagery, making the reading of his essays such a pleasure. This along with my wife's penchant for list-making, drew me to chose this book as the 'listen' for our 1200 mile holiday drive to visit family.

In the book, Dr. Gawande explores the way checklists can affect the handling of complicated and complex tasks by trained professionals. What he learns, through personal investigation and professional involvement with the World Health Organization, is that simple (and thoughtfully constructed) checklists can have a striking impact on the quality and volume of work of a group of professionals. Examples he explores include piloting modern commercial airplanes, managing the construction of a large building, providing rapid-response medical aid, rates of infection in hospital intensive care units, complication rates arising from surgery, and identifying prospect companies for investment by a large investment agency. In each of these cases, he shows how having and using thoughtfully designed (or evolved) checklists reduces errors and increases a group's ability to work as a team.

This latter effect is somewhat surprising and counterintuitive, but it makes a whole lot of sense with Dr. Gawande explaining it. So I'll leave that to him. The book is definitely worth the six hours of listening-time. The hard-copy version is probably a quicker read. As you read the book, I'll be thinking about how these ideas can be used in higher education and in the service of teaching mathematics and the sciences.

Epilogue: Though the book is good, the production of this audio book is uneven.

I loved Gawande's previous works, and avidly read every new piece in the New Yorker. This was underwhelming, and a bit boring at times. I agree with other reviewers who say it is padded and has a simple yet eloquent thesis. He even makes the episode about the Citbank Tower, which was riveting in the original New Yorker article (by another author) come off dull...

Lawyers often approach cases and clients as unique. Actually, we see similar fact scenarios over and over and we apply law that does not change in the short run. Atul Gawande suggests in The Checklist Manifesto,that a simple checklist works well in the surgical theatre and will work just as well in aviation, construction and in the legal environment.
Gawande asserts and makes the case that a checklist can help each of us to manage the mundane and the complex. He supports the premise that in medicine, in law and in aviation, the problem is applying the training and the knowledge that we have consistently and correctly. He argues that failure results from ineptitude rather than from ignorance.
While Gawande supports his premise primarily with examples from medicine he does include examples of the successful use of checklists in aviation and construction. His writing is current, including the emergency landing, "The Miracle on the Hudson River" in January, 2009, which provided an example of the use of simultaneously managed checklists for restarting the engine and ditching the plane.

All in all, the book was written with clarity and it moved well so that interest is maintained.

This is an incredible though very seemingly simple book. Checklist. Ok, you already think you know what it's about. And if you listen to it thinking you know, you'll only hear what you expect. That being the case, you'll miss the brilliant elegance of this book.

A concept that has saved thousands of lives? A checklist? Yup. I'm already seeing sales increases for one client by employing a prospect checklist.

You have to really put your own thought into this book. Ask yourself, how can I use this? Do that and you'll get the benefit. Otherwise you'll confuse your "To Do" list with a checklist. They aren't the same thing...

Get this book while you can and then head to Amazon and buy all they will let you---there's a limit! Give them to your best clients.

I have used checklists for many years and depend upon them for everything. I agree with everything in this book as far as it goes, but the book just gives some reasons why checklists are a good thing. They are. I was hoping for more practical aspects. For example the author mentions that updating lists is very important, but there are techniques that can help update lists effectively, which were not described. I hoped for more How-To and less Why. If you are already convinced checklists are a good idea, this listen is mostly a waste of time.

Initially I wondered how Gawande would get a whole book out of this material. In fact, it is a short book and I found myself regretting that it was over! Riveting, fascinating, not at all dry or boring.

Only a few books may make a difference in your performance and accomplishments. This is one of them. Whatever your role or position, developing a working checklist for your activities will make a difference and the insight given in this book about what makes a checklist useful, not too pedantic and not too general, is remarkable. Recommended.

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